Tommy Emmanuel

"It's always funny to me when people use the phrase, 'Best guitar player in the world'. There are too many variables... But if I had to pick one, it would be Tommy Emmanuel. Watching him perform can be a study in artistic and virtuosic human achievement."
-Steve Vai, Favored Nations Acoustic Records

www.tommyemmanuel.com

Two-time Grammy nominee guitarist Tommy Emmanuel has a professional career that spans over four decades and continues to intersect with some of the finest musicians throughout the world. A household name in his native Australia, love for Tommy's jaw-dropping musicianship and sheer onstage exuberance is beginning to spread in North America as well, via word of mouth from guitar afficianados, YouTube browsers, and those who simply flipped the channel to PBS one of the nights they aired his live performance.

If you've never heard of him, you're not alone.  Tommy's MySpace page is filled with fan comments like "my friend turned me on to your music and I spent the next 3 hours watching your YouTube videos -- you're incredible!"

Tommy's unique instrumental style - he calls it simply "finger style" - is akin to playing guitar the way a pianist plays piano, using all ten fingers to incorporate melody, rhythm, and bass lines.  It's a style his mentor Chet Atkins turned him onto as a child and the sort of thing you have to see to believe there isn't a band backing him up.  He moves fluidly between pop, rock, jazz, blues, bluegrass, and country with impressive authority and ease and mixes in non-stop slapstick humor that keeps the audience members on their tapping toes.

Guitar legend Chet Atkins was one of the first to inspire Emmanuel to pick up the guitar as a child. Decades later, Atkins himself became one of Emmanuel's biggest fans. In 1999, Chet honored Tommy Emmanuel with the title of "Certified Guitar Player" for his lifetime contribution to the instrument, a rare honor shared by only three other people in the world (Jerry Reed, Steve Warner and John Knowles). Atkins eventually recorded with Tommy in 1996 on "The Day the Finger Pickers Took Over the World", for which Emmanuel received his first Grammy award nomination.

At the peak of his career, the awards keep coming.  In 2008 Acoustic Guitar Magazine named him the "gold-medalist" in the fingerstyle category.  In January 2009, Guitar Player Magazine awarded him the annual "Guitar Legend" award for lifetime achievement.

Contact: Micah Sheppard, Publicist

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